Ghost of My Past
by GenericLoveShit
Summary: What if when the curse was enacted, Regina forget her memories just like everyone else? Starts out with the curse breaking. (changes in wording being made in first two chapters- will not affect general plot) Review if you liked/disliked
1. Chapter 1

The wave rippled out with an easy sigh, washing over Storybrooke in a silky summer breeze. Like salt in ocean breezes this wave carried memories with it, and in every life they were left behind. All the people smiled, flexed their hands, and stretched their backs. Testing how their old minds felt in their skin again, teaching their nerves to spark again. All the people smiled except Regina Mills because Regina Mills didn't want her memories.

Emma Swan watched helpless as Regina's face grew tired. Each memory in her mind was a weight tied down on her chest; she sunk under the pressure, drowning in her own head. Water was even leaking out of her eyes. It threw Emma off, seeing the Mayor like this. The woman was usually so _strong. _Maybe not strong by anyone else's definition, always so upbeat and lighthearted, but Emma saw a certain strength in being able to wear such a happy face all the time. She was nice, even offered Emma a job in town and a place in Henry's life.

Poor kid, he clutched her hand even tighter now. He sure did give everyone a scare today with his little trip to the hospital bed.

_Could've been his death-bed-_

-No. Emma couldn't even let that thought go through her mind because Henry was alive and well. She felt his warm little hand clutch hers and she knew he would be fine. A kiss on the forehead and his health had been restored, coincidently that was the moment that everything else went to shit.

"They're all getting their memories back!" Emma didn't believe it until she turned and saw it herself, all these people with their newly bright faces. Everyone seemed so alive, all except Regina in which it was evident that at least a part of her was dying.

Regina let out a pained gasp, like the sort that a person would make if a knife had been jabbed in their stomach in a quick motion from being pulled out behind someone's back; the sort of gasp that meant that a person was in terrible pain, and had absolutely zero time to brace for impact. She stood with her back bent at the middle, mouth open in a soundless scream with eyes so flooded with tears that one could barely make out the honey brown that colored her irises. Then in a rush it was over. Her muscles loosened and her mouth hung slack but there was something changed in her.

Everyone else's memories greeted them with ease. Rushing up to them like two friends run to meet each other in a crowded street, linking their arms together and matching their strides as they easily meld into one another's personalities.

When Regina smiled it was like glass breaking, and it was obvious that she had been possessed by the ghost of her past.


	2. Chapter 2

[ONE WEEK EARLIER]

"I can't thank you enough for accepting this job." Regina said gratefully, still relishing in this extra time she had free. Late afternoon light poured through the cracked curtain slit, just enough to cast a rosy-sheeted glow over Emma Swan's face and causing the tips of her blonde curls to shine pink. It was dark in Regina's office apart from that light, the kind of quiet dark where it's ok to confess things that you wouldn't in the brightness of day. Regina sat on the corner of her desk, not bothering with frilly formalities in the presence of the laid-back Sheriff. She liked that about Emma.

"Yeah not at all, and besides Graham's easy enough to be around all day," Emma breezed in an awkward attempt to be casual. The words just came out fast, the dark made her uneasy mixed with the casual position of the Mayor beside her. When Emma heard the world 'Mayor' the image that came to her head was of a big boisterous man who paraded about in a ridiculous looking sash like one of the Miss America pageant girls only with the word "MAYOR" sewn onto it, thick handlebar moustache, and a loud leading voice.

Then there was Storybrooke's Mayor; slight and soft-spoken with short dark hair that always looked very smooth when Regina ran her fingers through it. She did that a lot. Regina looked so small perched up on the dark wood desk, back hunched over under the weight of an entire town full of problems to sort through. Emma couldn't compute how anyone would vote her to be their Mayor. Not that she was incapable, because if anything Regina Mills was a hell of a good Mayor. Just that Emma was afraid that this work would break her like a china doll. Emma supposed that was why she'd been so quick to accept the job as a cop, anything to hold Regina Mills together.

"Mmm," Regina mused, "I just get this weird feeling that everything's changing lately," she raised a hand to her empty ring-finger when she spoke these words, twisting an invisible ring. "I can barely keep up." She sighed with a tired smile, "It's kind of a gift that you showed up right now,"

Emma smiled back.

[PRESENT]

When Regina raised her head it was with a new sense of unbalance, and the stirred up thoughts in her head inked the room with black and gray. Crumbling: that was the only word to describe this New Regina. She was crumbling in her jet-black Jimmy Choo's with nowhere to hide.

"The Queen-"

"_That _was who she was,"

"All these years, I-"

"-Evil Queen!"

"Mom?" Henry breathed, more to himself than to his mother. That was the thing, though. Part of his kid mind saw Regina's face and thought 'Mom' because that was the face he always knew to be his mother's. The other part, the adult in him, felt the strangeness of the air and questioned whether this woman standing before him was his mother or some other personality on her own that Henry had never had the awful pleasure of being introduced.

"Henry," A sigh of relief from the Mayor; Regina's newly darkened face lit with another broken-glass smile and she started for the hospital bed. Emma knew that something wasn't right. Her voice was lower, her footsteps were with a sense of regality, but it was innocent as her attention was directed towards Henry and only Henry. She didn't seem to be aware of, or care to acknowledge, anyone else standing in the room until their cries of protest pierced her ears. She blinked rapidly, but then seemed to remember. She was an enemy here.

"Let me see him," Regina commanded of Mother Superior, who was acting like a barrier between Regina and the boy she'd raised and loved from his baby years and beyond.

"You know I can't do that."

Regina gave Mother Superior an odd steady look, only lasting lightly as short bursts of maniacal laughter rudely forced their way up from the back of Regina's throat, and Emma was floored by the sound of it. A melancholic splat of broken belled hysteria that made the previous silence seem all the more appealing.

"Well thank the Gods we all have our Fairy Godmother back!" Regina announced in a mock-happy voice. Smile like an elastic band stretched too tight, she clasped her hands together with her bloody red nails and smiled through the tears like her mother always told her to.

"You deserve to _rot _in Tartarus with all the rest of this world's filthy wretches!" Her voice was so polluted, like black smokestacks, but Emma liked it all the same. This New Regina had a careful way with words, painting them in her essence before letting them loose. This wasn't Regina, New or old, this was the Evil Queen straight from the books; one who'd ravaged cities and ruined hearts.

"Words. That's all you have in this land." Mother Superior spoke calmly. "What will you do here? There's no magic in this place, it's barren."

Regina laughed twistedly, averting her eyes and shaking her head like Mother Superior was some little kid. "How could you know what I know about Magic? Your brand is too _kind_," Her eyes flitted up and down the fairy's form, confirming this point to herself.

Nevertheless . . . _ Magic_ of any brand isn't so feeble as to be confined by the barriers of worlds! It's not found in places it's found in _souls_, lying dormant in all of us. Because you see, my dear, Magic is a hell of a heavy sleeper. It takes a whole lot of racket" Regina raised a hand to her heart, "clanging around inside you to wake it up, but once it has there is no turning it away."

Regina looked at Mother Superior and knew that the fairy wasn't going to budge an inch, but she also saw Henry and knew that now was not the time or place for any kind of brawl. Then her eyes locked with Emma's: perplexity; deer in the headlights. Regina sighed. With a wave of her hand she was engulfed in a billowing purple cloud.

Henry turned to Emma the moment the smoke cloud had dissipated. "I was right about the curse." Henry said, in the second saddest voice she'd ever heard, and started to weep.


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N: Thank you so much for the lovely favorites/follows/reviews they make my day (: I'm sorry I haven't updated, my English teacher and my World History teacher both decided to assign us major projects coNvENIENTLY ON THE SAME FUCKING DAy. So I've been busy with those, and have been neglecting my poor story! I'm terribly sorry about that and I hope you enjoy this chapter! **

**also I listened to '**_**Rich (ft. Anna Roo)' **_**on SoundCloud while writing this for anyone who's interested. It doesn't REALLY relate to this chapter or anything at all for me, oddly enough, but it has a nice sound and it kind of inspired me to write at all today.**

[Storybrooke, Day 1]

Regina woke abruptly from a terrible nightmare, eyes fluttering open. It felt like years since she'd been truly awake, and she welcomed the sunrays heating over her skin. Before Regina could recall any details the dark episode was gone from her head, swirling away steamily. What an odd dream. She hoped she never had to repeat it again, but no worries because it was just a breezy little dream made of pictures in the back of her head. Regina rose from the tangled sheets, made into ugly sleep knots from her obvious thrashing around during the night, and shook the shivers from her back because she had much better things to be doing with her time than to be worrying about these stupid things.

'Aren't dreams supposed to mean something?' Regina thought to herself as she went through the motions of all Monday mornings. Funny, because the one thing she remembered about her dream was that inside it she had been a Queen.

Oh, she understood it now! The irony of a Mayor dreaming herself a Queen, and Regina hoped she wasn't really so pretentious as to think herself a Monarch even subconsciously.

She didn't pick up on it, but something had been planted in her brain hours before to make thoughts skip before they hit the truth. So Regina shot the dream from her head, and never thought of it again. From the moment the clock hit 8:15 she was Regina Mills of 108 Mifflin Street; Mayor of Storybrooke, Maine. What did she care of Princes with their Princesses, or wicked Evil Queens?

[Present]

Alone. Regina choked on purple smoke, she had to get used to walking with such a weight on her chest again. Whole worlds existed inside her head, each with a different Regina calling the shots, but it was a shiny new Regina entirely that existed with all of them living at once. It was like the very worst panic attack, and the heartache was crushing. She sank onto Henry's bed, strangling his pillow but it didn't hug her back. It lay limp in her arms and Regina knew that if that pillow were a living creature she'd have squeezed its breath away. It still held Henry's smell in the fabric. Evil Queens don't cry. They were cold marble strength, hair sleek like black willow, eyes that break wars. Yet here she was with leaky waterfall eyes, lying on the bed of her ex-son. Surely he'd be taken away from her like a teacher confiscates a kid's cell phone in a classroom.

_The Idiots: Evil Queens can't be happy. Ever._

_Evil Queen:_

The Regina's in her head were buzzing bees, the Innocents merging with the Queens because once your heart was black there was no stopping it from contaminating the rest. She supposed she couldn't really call herself a Queen anymore. Just an angry witch who fell from grace.

_Fall from grace_. She'd heard the term, but Regina never really knew what it meant to be stripped of every power like this. Then again it wasn't that she'd fallen, Regina was pushed.


End file.
